The Buddha said: all beings suffer, all forms are without substance, the sea of suffering has no shore — turn back, and the far bank is there.
A monk who practised the ascetic discipline of suffering, he roamed the four seas and saw far too much of the Wulin’s grief and the world’s wear, and came to feel in his bones that all beings suffer.
He took the name Kuhai — the Sea of Suffering — wanting to ferry the suffering across.
A monk of real attainment, Kuhai could quiet or hold back an opponent’s Sha-Chi with sutra and verse, and restore himself through dharma formations.
After he joined the Council of Eleven, Kuhai remade his ritual implements — his monk’s staff, his prayer beads, his alms bowl — so that each of them could absorb great quantities of Sha-Chi. To serve his purpose he also built a colossal golden Arhat, a dharma image that hangs behind him, held there by his sense of Sha-Chi. The Arhat can draw in immense amounts of Sha-Chi, and can release it again, through scripture, in the form of killing moves.
Staff, beads, bowl and that vast golden Arhat: four implements in all, and these are the weapons Kuhai bore after his Transcension — the Four Vessels of Pure Karma.
He remade his own trunk as well, so that his flesh too could draw Sha-Chi in.
But as noted above, Kuhai did not undergo Transcension for the sake of killing. He did it for a vow that almost no one has ever heard of…
Buddhist Roots
Kuhai was a disciple of the Buddhist faith.
An ascetic of suffering from the first, he spent little of the earlier half of his life seated in meditation in a monastery. He did not chant sutras or strike the chime; he walked the world on foot and roamed the four seas, doing whatever lay in his power for the people he met who were sunk in suffering.
In time, many of those he saved never learned who he was, but all of them remembered the same back — a grey robe faded almost to white. A bamboo hat; a monk’s staff in his hand; prayer beads at his throat; kind eyes in a kindly face; white beard, white brows — and in every movement, the bearing of a great monk.
To the world he may have been only a good-hearted old man; on the long road of his life, he was watching the whole world.
On his travels he met every kind of person and saw every kind of pain and joy. All that he saw and felt along the way became dharma to him, and with that dharma he showed the road to the travellers he met.
Walking day after day, Kuhai found the people of the Wulin growing fiercer in temper; men would set upon each other and fight past all reason over the smallest thing.
He had made it his task to save the world and ferry all beings across, and held it as a principle to harm no living creature; yet in that ubiquitous violence, he could not always keep from hurting the innocent by mistake.
Kuhai searched on for where this violence came from, and slowly came to understand that the world contained a thing called “Sha-Chi.”
It lives in every heart. From a butcher killing a pig to two masters in a duel, any hand raised with the will to overcome carries Sha-Chi with it.
All the numberless beings of the world — their debts and grudges, their loves and hatreds, their laughter and their cursing — are in truth only Sha-Chi turning, spreading, diffusing; and the violence now filling the Wulin was drawing up, without limit, the lust to kill that lies at the bottom of every heart.
The Tianling Affair
Even as Kuhai wandered, he tried to find out where this violence — the violence that held the whole Wulin — had come from.
In the second month of the thirteenth year of The Order, word of the Remnant Volume of the Heavenly Tome went out from Tianling Peak, and martial artists came from everywhere to see it with their own eyes; among them were many heads of sects and masters of halls — the upper ranks of the Wulin.
He sensed something out of the ordinary hanging over the peak, and had a premonition that this strange Sha-Chi would sooner or later break out into disaster.
By the time Kuhai followed that Sha-Chi to Tianling Peak, it was far too late. The heroes of the world, touched by the Sha-Chi, had turned into blood-drunk beasts past all reason.
They killed one another until the blood ran in rivers; the ferocity of it set a watcher trembling.
A monk of attainment who grieved for heaven and pitied men, Kuhai was kept by his dharma from that towering tide of Sha-Chi — but he could only watch the slaughter happen, with no power to stop it.
In silence he walked to the middle of that mountain of corpses and sea of blood, and sat down.
“Namo amitābhāya tathāgatāya”
“Tadyathā, amṛtodbhave”
“Amṛtasiddhaṃbhave…”
His deep voice carried the Rebirth Dharani across Tianling. One of the few who came down from the peak alive, Kuhai chanted it for the thousands of dead and wounded, and only after forty-nine days did he drag his worn-out body off the mountain.
On the day he left Tianling Peak, Kuhai made the one great vow of his life —
“There will come a day when this poor monk dissolves every last trace of Sha-Chi in the world. Amitābha.”
Through who knows how many sleepless nights, Kuhai turned it over and over, and at last went back to Tianling Peak and joined the Council of Eleven that the survivors had formed.
Kuhai knew that every member of the Council had their own thoughts and their own ends. For himself, he wanted only to borrow the power of the Heavenly Tome and wipe the world’s killing away for good.
To Ferry All Beings
Out of what he had learned from the Heavenly Tome and from the Xuan family’s technology, Kuhai remade his own body, turning his flesh and the implements he carried into vessels that could absorb Sha-Chi.
He fought his opponents and, as he fought, drew in the Sha-Chi they gave off.
The deeper his understanding of Sha-Chi, the denser his own Sha-Chi became, and in time Kuhai seemed to work out for himself the law by which the substance called Sha-Chi is generated in the Phantom World.
In his theory all things turn in an endless cycle. Sha-Chi passes from one to another through the Wulin, but the total is fixed; only by gathering the world’s Sha-Chi in full and pinning it down in one place could that total be brought down.
So in the depths of Prison Mountain, where almost no one goes, he built a Buddha — a statue of monstrous size. Into it he poured the extraordinary technology he had grasped from the Heavenly Tome together with the traditional dharma formations he had practised for half his life. The statue stores the Sha-Chi he collects; the sea of fire in the volcano then burns it and purifies it away to nothing.
To clear the world of Sha-Chi he walked the Phantom World, stripping it from countless people of the Wulin. Most of those he emptied were left ruined men, but Kuhai never paused; all of it was for the sake of the world’s people.
In Phantom Blade
In the thirtieth year of The Order, the quarrel between Mirage — propped up by the Council of Eleven — and The Order itself came to a head. To find out what The Order was about, and to take in more Sha-Chi, Kuhai passed himself off as one of its Living Envoys. With three Envoys — Xiucai, Red Moon and Ah Fu — he went to the pagoda at the far end of Guze Bastion, on the pretext of reinforcing Soul and Zuo Shang, who had come to destroy Mirage and learn what lay at its heart.
Working at their side, Kuhai began to turn his own conduct over in his mind, and to ask whether all that he had done was truly for the people of the world.
In the end, amid that tangle of thought, Kuhai and Soul’s party reached the top of the pagoda and faced its guardian, the tower master Daosha. Kuhai weighed it this way and that, and then, in secret, drove the Sha-Chi stored in his body into Daosha, who was already giving way — and Daosha’s lust to kill burst wholly free.
But at that moment Ah Fu seized Kuhai by the arm and tore the mask off: he was no Envoy of The Order. This “Ah Fu” was in fact Lei Dang, a Living Envoy, sent by the Nether Lord to play the fool and quietly watch whether a spy had been slipped into the relief party.
With his cover gone, Kuhai admitted freely that he was indeed a member of the Council of Eleven — and that the faith Soul and Zuo Shang had shown along the road had truly moved him. For that, he was willing to let them see the real Mirage.
At midnight Kuhai led them up to the spire, and the airship Mirage showed itself before them.
He went aboard with the rest and saw the Lord of Mirage destroyed with his own eyes; then, in the confusion of the ship tearing itself apart, he disappeared.
In Phantom Blade II
With Mirage destroyed, in the thirty-first year of The Order the Council of Eleven formally resolved on the strategy of Blossom on All Sides.
Kuhai, though, did not go to any city to raise a revolt. From first to last he had wanted one thing only: to wipe out every trace of Sha-Chi in the world. In the end he chose to stay beside the great Buddha he had built, and refine the world’s Sha-Chi away.
While he was there, Bloodbath passed the same way and saw what Kuhai was doing. Kuhai told him he hoped that one day, through those young friends of his — Soul and Zuo Shang — Bloodbath might be freed once and for all from endless killing and madness.
Bloodbath thought it over, then left without a word, and Kuhai was left keeping his watch before the giant Buddha.
He stood beneath the great Buddha and poured the Sha-Chi he had taken into it.
Sweat soaked through his robes and his body shook slightly, but his eyes were as steady as ever.
The Buddha high above seemed to be looking at him; and he was looking at the Buddha.
“If it can end the killing intent, what matter if I am cast into hell…”